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1.4.1-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 1.4.1 One Mother meets Another Mother So my translation calls the Thenardier’s inn their ‘cook-shop.’ What is a cook-shop? Because ‘inn’ is a much more normal translation that people might actually have heard of even if it isn’t exactly right. I disagree with the idea that even here Madame Thenardier is a good mother and question Fantine’s judgment furhter for thinking that she is. Who looks at a giant chain and thinks “I should take my two-year-old and one-year-old to play!” That is not good parenting. Apparently one of these children had chestnut hair and the other had brown hair. Or…they were both brunette. Azelma bared her stomach with the “chaste indecency of childhood.” Is it really indecent if it’s so accepted because of their age? I mean, really? I’m trying to decide if Fantine has good judgment in anything at all. It’s perhaps not her fault if she doesn’t since she was never taught any or given an example but she left home because it was boring, stopped working because she didn’t like it, fell for Tholomyes, let herself get pregnant without marriage or some sort of support, left Cosette with the Thenardiers, and now we find out that she looks really poverty-stricken while Cosette looks like a rich baby. I understand her need to coddle Cosette and keep her healthy but I really don’t see the sense in spending money she doesn’t have on a fine outfit for her instead of a cheaper outfit that would mean she wouldn’t be in such dire straits. Was her plan really to just go back home and hope she found a woman with children to leave Cosette with on the way there? What if she didn’t find anybody? Why couldn’t she pretend to be a widow in M-sur-M again? Then there would be no scandal to ferret out and all the old busybodies in the world wouldn’t have been able to tract Tholomyes or find people who cared enough about Fantine to remember her. Now we have proof that Tholomyes knew about Cosette and just didn’t take an interest in her but Fantine didn’t really notice/mind until he abandoned them. Fantine tried to write to him but he never responded. I wonder if he even opened the letters. Perhaps he did not care enough to read them and perhaps he read them and felt smug about the fact she wasn’t forgetting him. The others may have had reason to think their girls could just move on but what kind of an idiot is Tholomyes for not realizing there was nothing left for Fantine with a child? Really, she introduces herself as Madame Thenardier? At some point Hugo’s lack of first names for all but three characters or so stretches creduility. I’m kind of sad that Favorite, Dahlia, and Zephine weren’t really friends either and just drifted out of each other’s lives. Though I guess if they were friends they would have known about the artist. And naturally Cosette is just the most adorable baby ever. It doesn’t excuse the author wanting to eat her, though. I have to admit, I really don’t like those nicknames that aren’t anything like their real names. People can be called whatever they want but when it’s legitiamtely supposed to be a shortened form of the name and it clearly isn’t…it drives me crazy. I know Fantine was waiting for her opening but it was still pretty abrupt. Just walking up to a stranger and asking if she can raise her kid…Thenardier is eavesdropping on everything, I see. Fantine is lucky that they don’t take all of her eighty francs right then. But if she had no money to go she wouldn’t leave Cosette there, perhaps. Did Thenardier really ask if a woman who has eighty francs and can afford to pay their ridiculous rates has clothes for her daughter? I wonder if they also charged Fantine to stay in their inn that night. Thenardiers luck is really ridiculous. I mean, he’s not lucky to always be in debt (how does that keep happening?) but it always works itself out for him. And he calls Eponine and Azelma his wife’s little ones. He’s not very paternal, I take it?